China seals town after police kill 20

Violence follows villagers' protest of rural land seizure

December 10, 2005|By From Tribune news services

BEIJING — Armed with guns and shields, hundreds of riot police sealed off a southern Chinese village after fatally shooting as many as 20 demonstrators and were searching for the protest organizers, villagers said Friday.

As many as 50 villagers are reported missing.

It was the deadliest known use of force by security forces against Chinese civilians since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989 and marked a surge in the social protests that have convulsed the Chinese countryside.

During the protest Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village in southern Guangdong province, thousands of people gathered to protest the compensation offered by the government for land to be used to construct a wind power plant.

Tear gas fired, then bullets

Police fired into the crowd and killed a handful of people, mostly men, villagers reached by telephone said Friday. Accounts of the death toll ranged as high as 20.

"From about 7 p.m. the police started firing tear gas into the crowd, but this failed to scare people," said a resident who gave his name only as Li and said he was at the scene, where a relative was killed. "Later, we heard more than 10 explosions and thought they were just detonators, so nobody was scared. About 8 p.m. they started using guns, shooting bullets into the ground, but not really targeting anybody. Finally, about 10 p.m. they started killing people."

Terrified residents said their village has been occupied since then by thousands of security officers, who have blocked off all access roads and were arresting any residents who tried to leave.

Although security forces often use tear gas and truncheons on demonstrators, it is rare for them to fire into a crowd -- as the military did in putting down pro-democracy demonstrations around Tiananmen Square, when hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed.

State media have not reported the incident, and both provincial and local governments have repeatedly refused to comment. This is typical in China, where the ruling Communist Party controls the media and lower-level authorities are leery of releasing information.

All the villagers said they were scared, and most did not want to be identified. One man said the situation was still "tumultuous."

A 14-year-old girl said a local official visited the village Friday and called the shootings a "misunderstanding."

"He said [he] hoped it wouldn't become a big issue," the girl said over the telephone. "This is not a misunderstanding. I am afraid. I haven't been to school in days."

"We are not allowed to buy food outside the village. They asked the nearby villagers not to sell us goods," the woman said. "The government did not give us proper compensation for using our land to build the development zone and plants. Now they come and shoot us. I don't know what to say."

A villager said there were "several hundred police with guns in the roads outside the village Friday. "I'm afraid of dying. People have already died."

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper Saturday quoted residents who said authorities were trying to conceal the deaths by offering families money to give up bodies of the dead.

"They offered us a sum but said we would have to give up the body," an unidentified relative of one slain villager, 31-year-old Wei Jin, was quoted as saying. "We are not going to agree."

Police were carrying photos of villagers and trying to find people linked to the protest, the paper said, citing villagers.

The number of protests in China's vast, poverty-stricken countryside has risen in recent months as anger comes to a head over corruption, land seizures and a yawning wealth gap that experts say now threatens social stability. By the government's count, there were 74,000 disturbances in 2004, a big jump from previous years. Many more are believed to go unreported.

`Chilling' reports

"These reports of protesters being shot dead are chilling," said Catherine Baber, deputy Asia director at Amnesty International. "The increasing number of such disputes over land use across rural China, and the use of force to resolve them, suggest an urgent need for the Chinese authorities to focus on developing effective channels for dispute resolution."

On Friday, about 100 bereaved villagers gathered at a bridge leading into the town, briefly blocking access to security forces.